Saying NO

These days, I find one of my keenest pleasures in life - perhaps one of the only pleasures left to me in my declining years - is saying NO to job offers.

For someone as perennially cash-strapped as me, this is a hard thing to do - but that just makes doing so feel all the more empowering (and more satisfyingly reaffirming of one's integrity).

I have no significant work currently lined up, and my savings are not as substantial as I would wish, but.... I have just turned down a contract for 20,000 RMB. And gosh, it feels good.

This wasn't even a particularly difficult decision for me.

In fact, the money would have come to rather less than 20,000 RMB. And the school concerned is such a shambolic, fly-by-night operation that I wouldn't have had any great confidence in actually getting paid.

It would have required delivering 30 or so 1.5-hour lectures in the space of about a month - a pretty demanding schedule!

Oh yes, and I was going to have to produce all the material for this myself, from scratch. In just under a month. For no extra fee. Ah, this is China!

And they wanted me to produce this material in a form which they could turn into a book. Again without offering me any separate fee (although there was a very vague and unconvincing mention of "royalties", maybe, at some point in the far future).

And they wanted to relay my lectures via the Internet to several other venues - and untold hundreds of students - around China.

And they wanted to record these lectures, and sell them on DVD. Again, there was to be no extra fee. Not even "royalties". But they did suggest that becoming "a famous face in China" might help my career. (Yeah, right.)

They did also say that they knew that the money they were offering me for all this wasn't really very much, but since, you know, they had only just founded the company, they didn't have any money. If I could be patient and wait until they became obscenely successful, they might be able to pay me more for future projects.

I said......... NO.

The poor guys are probably quite upset with me. And quite uncomprehending of my objections (although I took some trouble to explain all the problems to them very carefully).

The thing that really depresses me, though, is that they probably will find some unprincipled ratbag to accept this proposition, do a half-assed job of the lecture series, and help them fleece hundreds of students out of a pretty substantial fee. Take the money and run.

Oh, the education biz in China - I despair of it again and again. But I keep trying to fight the good fight.